Sports Facts for Kids
Fun facts from the world of sports
Baseball legend Babe Ruth had an unusual superstition: he wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep cool during games. He changed the leaf every two innings. Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career, a record that stood for 39 years.
Backstroke is the only competitive swimming stroke where swimmers start in the water rather than diving from the starting blocks. Swimmers must hold on to the wall and push off backwards when the starting signal sounds.
Before 1968, high jumpers went over the bar face down. Then American Dick Fosbury invented a completely new technique at the Mexico City Olympics — going over backwards and headfirst. His method, the Fosbury Flop, is now used by every elite high jumper in the world.
In bobsled, the crew must sprint alongside their sled and push it as fast as possible before leaping in. The first few seconds of a bobsled run are crucial — teams that push harder at the start almost always finish faster, as the initial speed carries through the entire run.
Elite weightlifters drop under the bar so quickly during a clean that they can catch a barbell that is still moving upwards. This happens so fast it is invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen in slow-motion video replays.
Ancient Mayan people played a ball game called pok-a-tok over 3,000 years ago using a solid rubber ball that could not be touched with hands or feet — only hips, knees, and elbows. Some historians believe the losing team (or sometimes the winning team) was sacrificed after the game.
When rain interrupts a limited-overs cricket match, a complex mathematical formula called the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method is used to calculate revised targets for the chasing team. It was developed by two statisticians and is so complicated that even many cricket fans find it confusing.
Karate made its first and so far only Olympic appearance at the Tokyo 2020 Games (held in 2021). Despite having 100 million practitioners worldwide, it was not included in the Paris 2024 Games. Karate means 'empty hand' in Japanese.
The penalty shootout was invented by a German referee named Karl Wald in 1970 as a fairer way to settle drawn matches than tossing a coin. Before his idea, World Cup knockout matches that ended in a draw were decided by flipping a coin!
The four tennis Grand Slams are each played on a different surface: the Australian Open on hard court, the French Open on red clay, Wimbledon on grass, and the US Open on hard court. The ball behaves very differently on each surface, which is why very few players win all four in a career.